Perhaps the most
intellectually wide ranging and theoretically daring anthropologist of the
modern era, and the one who has had the most influence in philosophical and
lit-erary circles, Lévi-Strauss was born in Brussels in
1908 but grew up in Paris. He was a brilliant student with strong political
convictions, writing his baccalaureate thesis on the philosophical implications
of Marx before taking up a teaching post in the provinces.

Bored with his
job, Lévi-Strauss was determined to reconcile his intellectual interests with
his desire for adventure, and in 1935 he set off for São Paulo, Brazil to teach
sociology at the newly formed University there. Without any formal training in
anthropology, but inspired by his reading of American ethnographers, and
especially by Robert LOWIE's Primitive society, he used his holidays to begin
fieldwork with the Bororo and Caduveo tribes, and later conducted research with
the Nambikwara an experience
wonderfully evoked in his memoir Tristes tropiques (1963c), which remains the
best introduction to his elusive literary style a seductive blend of erudition and
intuition.

Lévi-Strauss
returned to Paris in 1939 but soon was obliged to migrate to New York, where he
taught afternoons in the New School, spent his mornings in the New York Public
Library reading ethnographies, and mixed with a remarkable circle of French
exiles and American academics in the evening. Especially influential was Roman
Jakobson, who introduced Lévi-Strauss to the work of the Prague school of
LINGUISTICS. It was with Jakobson's encouragement that he began work on the
book that gained him his reputation, The elementary structures of kinship
(1969a), which he completed in 1947 and presented as his doctoral thesis at the
Sorbonne.

In his classic
work on the link between kinship and exchange – The Elementary Structures of
Kinship(1949) –
Lévi-Strauss describes the following custom. In inexpensive restaurants in the
south of France, especially in the wine-growing regions, a meal normally
includes a small bottle of wine. The quality and quantity of wine for each
diner is the same: one glass of the lowest quality. Instead of pouring wine
into his or her own glass, the owner will pour the wine into that of a
neighbour. Despite the exchange, the quantity of wine remains the same.The exchange of wine
becomes a means of establishing social contact. Even more. In microcosm, the
link between exchange and the ‘total social fact’ is revealed, since it is not
what is exchanged that is important, but the fact of exchange itself, a
fact inseparable from the very constitution of social life.

Two important
aspects of Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology are introduced here. The first is the
principle that social and cultural life cannot be uniquely explained by a
version of functionalism: cultural life is not explicable in terms of the
intrinsic nature of the phenomena in question. Nor can it be explained
empirically by facts deemed to speak for themselves. In short, although
empirical research constitutes an important part of his work, Lévi-Strauss is
not an empiricist. Rather, he has always maintained that he is first and
foremost a structural anthropologist. Broadly, structural anthropology,
inspired by Saussure, focuses on the way elements of a system combine together,
rather than on their intrinsic value. ‘Difference’ and ‘relation’ are the key
notions here. Moreover, the combination of these elements will give rise to
oppositions and contradictions which serve to give the social realm its
dynamism.

‘Scope’ is another crucial aspect of Lévi-Strauss’s
approach. For while many social researchers have limited their interpretations
of social life to the specific society in which they have carried out
fieldwork, Lévi-Strauss adopts a universalist approach, theorizing on the basis
of both his own and other anthropologists’ data. Of all the general criticisms
that have been levelled against Lévi-Strauss, the one which claims that he
theorises from an inadequate fieldwork base is probably the most common in English-speaking
countries. For these are also the countries with the strongest empiricist
tradition.

Generally speaking, the stakes of Lévi-Strauss’s
work are high. They amount to a demonstration that when all the data are to
hand, there is no basis upon which one could draw up a hierarchy of societies
–whether this be in terms of scientific progress, or in terms of cultural
evolution. Rather, every society or culture exhibits features that are present
in a greater or lesser degree in other societies, or in other cultures.
Lévi-Strauss argues this way because he is persuaded that the cultural
dimension (in which language is predominant), and not nature – or the ‘natural’
– is constitutive of the human. Symbolic structures of kinship, language, and
the exchange of goods become the key to understanding social life, not biology.
Indeed, kinship systems keep nature at bay; they are a cultural phenomenon
based on the interdiction against incest, and as such are not a natural
phenomenon. They make possible the passage from nature into culture, that is,
into the sphere of the truly human. To understand this more fully, we turn to
Lévi-Strauss’s notion of structure.

‘Structure’ for Lévi-Strauss is not equivalent to
the empirical structure (whether, by analogy, it is deemed to be skeletal or
architectural) of a particular society, as it is in Radcliffe-Brown’s work.
Thus, structure is not given in observable reality, but is always the outcome
of at least three elements, and it is this ternary nature that gives it its dynamism.
Having said this, we should acknowledge that in Lévi-Strauss’s oeuvre,
there is in fact an ambivalence between the kind of structuralism which views
structure as an abstract model derived from an analysis of phenomena seen as a
(more or less) static system of differences – that is, the synchronic dimension
is privileged – and the notion of structure as being fundamentally ternary,
containing an inherently dynamic aspect. The third element of the ternary
structure would be always empty, ready to take on any meaning whatsoever. It
would be the element of diachrony, that is, the element of history and
contingency, the aspect which accounts for the perpetuation of social and
cultural phenomena. While Lévi-Strauss’s own explanation of the ‘structural’ in
structural analysis2 tends towards focusing on the synchronic dimension, in
practice his work clearly leads towards seeing structure as being essentially
ternary and dynamic. We can confirm this point through reference to
Lévi-Strauss’s most important writings on kinship, myth, and art.

Lévi-Strauss’s Introduction
to the Work of Marcel Mauss,published
shortly after the appearance of The Elementary Structures of Kinship,
shows that while exchange in Mauss’s Essay on the Gift is equivalent to
the ‘total social fact’, Mauss failed to recognise that exchange was also a key
to understanding the phenomenon of mana. Although Mauss had seen that
exchange was a concept constructed by the anthropologist and that it did not
have an intrinsic content, he treated mana differently. Like Durkheim,

Mauss attributed
to it the meaning it took on in indigenous societies, a meaning that sees mana
as having an intrinsic, or sacred, content.

Lévi-Strauss, on
the other hand, argues that the diversity of contents assumed by mana means
that it has to be seen as empty, much like an algebraic symbol,and able to take on any
number of meanings – like the word ‘thing’ in English. In short, mana is
a ‘floating’, or pure signifier with a symbolic value in itself of zero. And it
exists in a general sense (every culture will have examples of floating
signifiers) because there is an abundance of signifiers in relation to
signified, since language must be thought of as having come into being all at
once (it is a system of differences, and therefore fundamentally relational), while
knowledge (the signified) only comes into being progressively.

The structural
aspect of Lévi-Strauss’s approach here is more implicit than explicit. It consists
in the fact, first, that emphasis is not placed on the (hypothetical) content
of mana, but on its potential to assume a multitude of meanings. It is
an empty signifier, much as for Lacan the phallus has no intrinsic meaning, but
is the signifier of signification. Second, and more importantly perhaps, mana,
in Lévi-Strauss’s interpretation, is a third element intervening between the
signifier and the signified, the element which would give language its dynamism
and continuity. For if there were a perfect ‘fit’ between the level of the
signifier and the level of the signified, there would be nothing more to be
said, language would come to an end. The floating signifier, therefore, is a
structural feature of language in general, an element that introduces into it
an asymmetrical, generative aspect: the aspect of contingency, time and, in
Saussure’s terms, the level of parole.

Although
the title might suggest it, no explicit reference to Saussurian linguistics is
to be found in The Elementary Structures of Kinship. The reason, no
doubt, is that this, the first major work in structural anthropology, was
written in New York in the 1940s, and so before the revival of interest in
Saussure’s work had taken place in Europe – let alone America. In The
Elementary Structures of Kinship, marriage (the outcome of the universal
interdiction against incest) in non-industrialised cultures is reduced to two
basic forms of exchange: restricted exchange, and generalised exchange. The former,
may be represented as in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Restricted exchange

X → Y
Y → X

Here,
reciprocity requires that when an X man marries a Y woman a Y man marries and X
woman. Similarly, generalised exchange can be represented as in Figure 2.

Figure
2 Generalised exchange

Source: Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, p.
178.

Thus, where an A
man marries a B woman, a B man marries a C woman; where a C man marries a D
woman, a D man marries an A woman. Almost all of The Elementary Structures
of Kinship is a development of the variants of these two forms of
matrimonial exchange.

Even to the untrained observer, what is striking
about both forms of exchange is that reciprocity seems to entail a symmetrical
structure (the only difference between restricted and generalised exchange
being that the latter has twice the number of terms, thereby remaining entirely
symmetrical). As Lévi-Strauss later realised, the question arises as to whether
a symmetrical structure can be permanent; for after a period of time, groups X
and Y in restricted exchange would, through marriage, merge into a single
group. Similarly, even with generalised exchange – because of the symmetrical
nature of the structure – a single group would eventually emerge. In other words,
exchange, set in motion by the interdiction against incest, would encounter an
insuperable limit, one that would place at risk the very continuation of social
relations. For exchange to remain viable as an institution, the presence of a
third, heterogeneous element is always necessary. Such is indeed the theme of
two important articles – one published in 1945, the other in 1956 – which
clarify this point. In the first article, Lévi-Strauss points out that the
child is the dynamic, asymmetrical element in the kinship structure: we must
understand that the child is indispensable in validating the dynamic and
teleological character of the initial step, which establishes kinship on the
basis of and through marriage. Kinship is not a static phenomenon; it exists
only in self-perpetuation. Here we are not thinking of the desire to perpetuate
the race, but rather of the fact that in most kinship systems the initial
disequilibrium produced in one generation between the group that gives the
woman and the group that receives her can be stabilized only by the
counter-prestations in following generations.

The study of myth led Lévi-Strauss to refine his
structuralist approach. A clear enunciation of the principle that the elements
of myths gain their meaning from the way they are combined and not from their
intrinsic value, leads Lévi-Strauss to the position that myths represent the
mind that creates them, and not some external reality. Myths resist history:
they are eternal. Even different versions of a myth are not to be thought of as
falsifications of some true, authentic version, but as an essential aspect of
the structure of myth. On the contrary, different versions are part of the same
myth precisely because a myth is not reducible to a single uniform content, but
is a dynamic structure. Eventually, all the versions (diachronic aspect) of a
myth have to be taken into consideration so as its structure can become
apparent. From another perspective, myth is always the result of a
contradiction – for instance, ‘the belief that mankind is autochthonous’,
‘while human beings are actually born from the union of man and woman’. In effect, contradiction, as the
unassimilable aspect of human society, generates myths. Myth derives from the asymmetry
between belief and reality, the one and the multiple, freedom and necessity,
identity and difference, etc. Looked at in terms of language, myth, says
Lévi-Strauss, is ‘language functioning on an especially high level’. Moreover,
if langue – the synchronic element of language – is equated with
reversible time, and parole with the diachronic, or contingent,
historical aspect, myth constitutes a third level of language.

Myth is the (impossible) synthesis between the
diachronic and the synchronic aspects of language. It is the continual attempt
to reconcile the irreconcilable: since the purpose of myth is to provide a
logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement
if, as it happens, the contradiction is real), a theoretically infinite number
of [versions] will be generated, each slightly different from the others.

Myth thus becomes the third dimension of language:
in it a continuous attempt is made to reconcile the other two dimensions (langue
and parole) of language. Because complete reconciliation is
impossible ‘myth grows spiral-wise until the intellectual impulse which has
produced it is exhausted’. Myth grows, then, because, structurally, the
contradiction – the asymmetry – which gives it life, cannot be resolved. Like
myth, the facial painting of the South American Caduveo Indians, described in
Lévi-Strauss’s autobiographical work, Tristes Tropiques, provide another
illustration of structure as a dynamic, ternary phenomenon. There, facial
painting designs are asymmetrical arabesques – a ternary structure geared to
generate more designs. A purely symmetrical design, as well as being difficult
to ‘fit’ to a real face, would fail to fulfil the purpose assigned to it. This
purpose is like that of a figure in European playing cards. Each figure on a
playing card must fulfil both a contingent function; it is an element in a
specific game between players – and a structural (synchronic) function;
it is an element occupying a particular place in the pack, and this place never
changes. Caduveo facial painting tries to capture the symmetry of function
(status in the group), and the asymmetry of part played (contingency) by the
adoption of a composition that is symmetrical but set on an oblique axis, thus
avoiding the completely asymmetrical formula, which would have met the demands
of the role but run counter to those of the function, and the reverse and
completely symmetrical formula, which would have had the opposite effect. The
arabesques of the facial painting bring two conceptions of structure into sharp
focus.

For his part, Lévi-Strauss writes as though his own
work were more focused on the static, symmetrical, binary notion of structure,
while his actual analyses of social and cultural phenomena suggest that it is
the second, ternary view of structure which has far greater explanatory and
methodological significance. Such an ambivalence with regard to the basis of
his theoretical framework has led to misunderstandings. In particular, critics
have been able to claim that history is neglected in structural anthropology, a
fact that has been played up because, no doubt, of Lévi-Strauss’s hostility to
Sartre’s Existentialism, a doctrine in which almost every act is historical
(that is, contingent). Furthermore,
Lévi-Strauss’s insistence on the scientific status of anthropology (admittedly
in order to defend the possibility of a social science detached from immediate
political debates) sits oddly with his view that science cannot entirely escape
being mythical, and the view that cultures are not hermetically sealed off from
each other, but constitute an infinite series of transformations. And so while,
for instance, science thinks of the concrete, native thought thinks with
the concrete. Again, when Lévi-Strauss says in the ‘Overture’ to The Raw
and the Cooked that the book about myth is itself a myth, the very
possibility of a detached science in the usual Western sense is brought into
question. Lévi-Strauss, however, has often shown himself to be loath to take
the consequences of this into account.

Unlike Julia Kristeva, or those inspired by Lacan’s
reading of Freud, there is little about subjectivity in Lévi-Strauss’s oeuvre.
It is as though he believed that Durkheim’s battle to separate psychology
from anthropology and sociology were still to be won, and that any concessions
to a theory of subjectivity would be equivalent to conceding to the explanatory
power of psychology over anthropology. But this battle is not still to be won.
And the anthropologist’s work suffers from the absence of any attempt to
include within it a theory of the subject.

Nevertheless, the significance of Lévi-Strauss’s
anthropology, as mentioned earlier, cannot be limited to its analytical
contents. Much more is at stake. For Lévi-Strauss shows the complexity of
non-industrialised cultures which the West – often through its anthropologists
(cf. Lévy-Bruhl and Malinowski) – had assumed to be equivalent to the childhood
of mankind and who, through that fact, were deemed to be more primitive and
more simplistic than the West in their thinking (primitive societies have myth;
the West has science and philosophy, etc.). Lévi-Strauss’s universalism should
thus be understood to mean that transformations of the same myth (as in the
Oedipus myth) throughout the world indicate that human beings belong to a
single humanity, but that the presence of others is essential if we are to
constitute our differences.

On
the methodological level, the main project, the isolation of a small number of
elementary invariant structures from which the diversity of observable kinship
structures might be derived, is directly inspired by the work of Roman Jakobson
and Nicolai Trubetzkoy in phonology. On the conceptual level, the notion of the
unconscious operation of social norms is construed by analogy with the implicit
rules of language. The analogy had already been well established in
anthropology since Franz Boas at least, to whom Lévi-Strauss refers, but he
clearly also has in mind more contemporary developments in linguistics (Lévi-Strauss,
1967 [1949]: 126–7 [108–9]). Further, the linguistic model is not mentioned in
the conception of agent and object of exchange as arbitrary and differential
signs, but the argument that women are as much signs as values and the
differential variation of marked/non-marked between givers and takers are both
clearly based on the linguistic concept of binary opposition. Finally, the idea
of culture-specific socialization of individuals as the regressive selection
and combination of universal traits is
compared with the process of language acquisition.

Yet,
although inspired by structural phonology, Lévi-Strauss proposed a completely
new method to explain the mechanisms of symbolic and social systems.
Essentially, it is the model of exchange, Marcel Mauss’s Gift (1950) to Lévi-Strauss,
as Harris (1968: 484) punningly put it, which is seen to be more important to
the theoretical infrastructure of The Elementary Structures. Giving to others,
an act that necessarily generates a debt, has the effect of creating social
relationships by making it possible to renew and perpetuate them; it is an act
on which the very functioning of the social order is based. Exchange is the
mechanism underlying different rules of marriage exogamy: this is the positive
aspect of the incest prohibition, seen as the primary and archetypal agent of
social cohesion, representing the passage from ‘‘nature’’ to ‘‘culture’’, from
the indifferent biological relation of individuals to their social relation.
Without this properly dialectical sublation of the natural within the social,
society could not exist. Once men are forbidden to enjoy their own women but
must exchange them for others, they are forced to set up a system of exchanges,
which provides the basis for the organization of society.

Lévi-Strauss’s
methodological closure may consist in a relatively limited range of responses
and default positions, in a kind of cross-categorical application of different
models of analysis and replication of methodologies, which are part of his
constant appeal to unify the different parts of his system and ensure its
overall theoretical coherence (Johnson, 2003: 186–7).
Yet in a way Lévi-Strauss’s work is also, as Geertz (1988: 32) put it,
organized neither linearly in a progress of views, nor quantumly in a series of
discontinuous reformulations of a fixed and single view, but centrifugally, as
a virtual analogue of his own kaleidoscopic image of “concrete thought”. In
this sense, its overall meaning is well constructed in a syntactic conjunction
of discrete elements by projecting the analogue axis of paradigmatic
substitutions played out vertically along what Jakobson (1981 [1960]) called
the plane of similarity, or ‘‘metaphor’’, onto the digital axis of syntactic
combination played out horizontally along what he called the plane of
contiguity, or ‘‘metonymy’’. This makes Lévi-Strauss’s whole oeuvre look like a
metonymically adjoined poetic text. This is a model of analysis where any
aspect analysed stands side by side with the others, where the meaning of the
whole lies, in good structuralist style, in the conjunction rather than in the
parts conjoined, as if the syntax of syntax, the enclosing form, were abstract
enough to represent or govern the whole.

Its Kaleidoscope

A cotraveler who seats endlessly on a chair that we tend to call world and moves through wonder places. Try not to move from the chair, transcending time. Try to unearth silences and capture through multiple lenses. Behind the corner of my eyes there are things I can not see... things I do not understand...
So here I am with words to share and become a cotraveler from my being. Yes, so many things to express but not genuinely gifted with skills.